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Laughery: War on sex or just colleges gone crazy?

By Ron Laughery

Posted:
01/12/2014 01:00:00 AM MST

I 'm probably not the only person in Boulder who vacillates between being intellectually shocked and wildly amused over the ongoing Patti Adler fuss at the University of Colorado. Adler, a sociology professor at CU, has taught a course entitled "Deviance in U.S. Society" for years. Over time, it became a popular class and, in spite of taking on a topic that is, by definition, dealing with the fringes of acceptable social behavior, no student has ever lodged a complaint about the course content. Maybe that's because Adler leaves out some of the really good stuff or maybe because students signing up to learn about "deviant behavior" are hoping for the really good stuff. Either way, students seemed to enjoy the educational experience.

Those were the days when men were men, women were women, and deviance was accepted academic subject matter. No more.

The course includes a prostitution skit where student aides working for class credit role-play parts of "the world's oldest profession." Apparently, some aides found this a bit too creepy, but they didn't want to offend Adler with their hang-ups so, they decided instead to squawk up the academic chain. It took about 12 seconds for this little nugget to make it to CU's Office of Discrimination and Harassment which, according to their website, considers anything that qualifies as "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" as sexual harassment. Smelling trouble, this brain trust in charge of investigating sexual harassment at CU sat in on Adler's class and busted her for the crime of Risking Sexual Harassment at CU. The CU Administration responded calmly by arranging a firing squad and doing everything they could to get Adler out of the university and-I-mean-now.

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Adler didn't like that idea, so she told her story to the students, faculty, and media and watched it blow up in CU's face. It worked.

What allowed Adler to extract herself from this absurd charge of sexual harassment was her status as a faculty member with the shields of tenure and academic freedom to protect her. Ponder for a moment, though, that, without those formidable defenses, she might have ended up like many college students today who find themselves thrown under the bus by their University's Offices of Sexual Harassment with no due process and no chance for redress.

Take for example Joshua Strange at Auburn University who in 2011 was accused by a girlfriend of forcing himself upon her. However, the alleged incident had occurred after they had been dating for several months and she didn't make a formal accusation until after their acrimonious breakup months later. Strange was fully cleared through the legal system -- the accuser never even showed up in court. Even so, Auburn kicked him out of the university and will arrest him for setting foot on campus again.

How did that happen? Like CU, Auburn conducts "trials" of sexual harassment in secret without rules, procedures, nor accountability. However, in an audio recording of the Strange trial obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the lack of fair treatment and due process was frighteningly apparent. Standards of proof were arbitrarily changed and then summarily ignored. Strange's lawyers were forbidden to speak, much less question the accuser. No qualified legal experts were involved -- the committee was chaired by a librarian and included students, a staffer from the College of Liberal Arts and a fisheries professor. Strange got crushed.

There's a reason for this absurd level of paranoia about sexual harassment at American colleges. In April 2011, the Assistant Education Secretary for Civil Rights in the Obama administration, Russlynn Ali, threatened to withhold federal money from educational institutions that failed to take a hard line against sexual misconduct so that "all students feel safe in their school." Losing federal money is a death sentence to most universities, so they can't let that happen. Instead, it's much safer, not to mention easier, to find a student or faculty member guilty of sexual harassment regardless of the truth. Welcome to this new reality, Adler and Strange.

Make no mistake, sexual harassment happens and, when it does, people should be held accountable for their bad behavior. But, setting the bar so low that "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" gets people kicked out of college is a formula for unfairly ruining peoples' lives. And, that is exactly what is happening in American higher education today.

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